Improving the customer experience on an e-commerce site has historically been about optimising around transactions, making your website easy to use and focusing on conversion rates at various points in the funnel.

To be really successful though, it’s critical to think beyond this idea of transactional optimisation.

A fully optimised online customer experience means much more than just making it easy for your customers to buy things, it’s about building long-term relationships through personalisation, timely relevance and treating visitors as individuals.

Saying the right thing to the right person at the right time. You need to consider how to optimise that relationship.

That's the start of countless jokes, but it's not a joke for SceneTap. For the Chicago-based startup, a man walking into a bar is just another event that can be tracked and analyzed.

Thus far, SceneTap has tracked 8.5m such events at more than 400 bars and nightclubs using cameras that allow it to determine how crowded a bar is, the approximate ages of patrons and male-to-female ratios.

Facebook is the world's largest social network and arguably it knows more about many individuals than any other organization.

The data it collects from the hundreds of millions of users it serves has enabled Facebook to build a billion-dollar advertising business, and serves as justification for Facebook's valuation, which may top $100bn when the company finally makes its public debut.

Digital technologies are having a transformational impact on the communications environment but whilst much analysis has been conducted into implications for client-side marketers, a relative paucity of research exists into how agencies are adapting their processes, offerings and capabilities.

If you were asked to think of one company that is defined by its use of algorithms, you might name Google.

And for good reason: the search giant's algorithms are not only at the heart of its success, but for many, they're the source of constant hope and fear as changes to them can literally make or break businesses.

Groupon may be a multi-billion dollar company, but the daily deal market has lost quite a bit of its luster over the past year. From consumer fatigue to merchant nightmares, the daily deal isn't going away but will likely have to evolve sooner than later.

One of the ways Groupon is addressing this is by tapping into different markets. For instance, it's experimenting with outdoor kiosks that target deals to tourists in popular U.S. cities.

We’re living in the era of the digital data deluge. Think about how often you check your bank balance online versus going to a teller, how many emails you receive a day, the number of hours you spend on your smartphone not making phone calls.

Consumers leave contrails of data as a result of their digital interactions, and this behavioral data creates opportunities to drive customer acquisition, reduce operating expenses, and make faster, better decisions.